Faith 7 for 22 Orbits

Thirteen seconds past 8: Q4, range-zero
time, on the morning of May 15, 1963, Mercury-Atlas 9 lumbered upward the two
inches that defined liftoff and thundered on toward its keyhole in the sky.
Inside MA-9, Astronaut Gordon Cooper felt the smooth but definite push intensify
as Faith 7 gained altitude faster each second. His clocks marking the
moments in synchronization, Cooper shouted through the din of the afterburner
behind him to Walter Schirra, his predecessor and now capsule communicator at
the Cape, "Feels good, buddy. . . . All systems Go "55

Sixty seconds upward, MA-9 initiated its pitch program, and Cooper felt the
max-q vibrations grow, but the rate gyros sensed greater lateral oscillations
than the pilot did. Six or seven swings from peg to peg on his instruments, and
the flight smoothed out. Two minutes and 14 seconds upward Cooper heard "a loud
'glung' and then a sharp, crisp 'thud' for staging" as booster engines cut
themselves out and off. Then away flew the needless escape tower, and at three
minutes after launch cabin pressure sealed and held while Cooper reported,
"Faith Seven is all go."

The Atlas sustainer engine continued to accelerate, and its guidance system
performed perfectly for two more minutes before SECO. Faith 7 and
"Sigma 7" swapped remarks on the sweetness of the trajectory. Schirra, at
the point of Cooper's orbital insertion and capsule separation, said, "Smack dab
in the middle of the go plot. Beautiful." And Cooper replied, after turning
around on the fly-by-wire, "Boy, oh, boy . . . working just like advertised!"

In full horizontal flight over Bermuda at 17,547 miles per hour, Cooper
watched his booster lag and tumble for about eight minutes, then checked his
temperatures and contingency recovery areas, and tried to adjust to the strange
[495] new sensations and perspectives at a little more than 100 miles (near his
perigee) above sea level. Floating higher in his couch, now that he was
weightless, Cooper agreed with Carpenter's report that an astronaut's sense of
the cockpit changes when he reaches zero g and no longer feels himself flying
flat on his back. Status checks with the Canary Islands and Kano, Nigeria, came
on so fast that Cooper could hardly believe he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean
and half of Africa already.

Over Zanzibar, he learned that his orbital parameters looked good enough for
at least 20 revolutions and that all Faith 7's telemetry was working
well. His suit temperature fluctuated somewhat erratically, but as he watched
his first sunset from space over the Indian Ocean he forgot his discomfort while
looking at the airglow, spotting the twinkleless stars, and observing sheet
lightning in scattered thunderstorms "down under." He saw the lights of Perth,
Australia, on schedule 55 minutes after liftoff, and over Canton Island, in the
Polynesian Archipelago, just south of the equator, the Sun began to rise behind
him (as he flew backward toward the sunrise), and Cooper reported observing
Glenn's "fireflies," or Carpenter's "frostflies," drifting along with the
spacecraft at five miles per second.

From Guaymas, Mexico, Grissom, acting as capsule communicator, officially
relayed the computer-blessed "go for seven orbits." Cooper, audibly impressed
with the perfection of the flight so far, said, "It's great. . . . quite a full
night. . . . everything appears very nominal on board here." As Cooper passed
over the launch site at Cape Canaveral, Schirra raised him on the radio circuits
once again and complained, "You son-of-a-gun, I haven't got anything to talk
about. . . . I'm still higher and faster, but I have an idea you're going to go
farther." The manned one-day mission was off to an auspicious start. Alan
Shepard, who had been Cooper's backup pilot and was now also talking to Faith
7 from Mercury Control, coached Cooper into his second orbit, saying, "All
of our monitors down here are overjoyed. Everything looks beautiful."

Cooper thought so, too. All his spacecraft and physiological systems
performed perfectly on his first two orbits. His only complaint concerned an
oily film on his "windshield" that seemed to be on the outside pane of the
window. Between Zanzibar and Muchea on his second pass, Cooper dozed off for a
four-minute nap and then drifted across the Pacific, observing storms while
inverted and stars when facing spaceward.

Beginning with his third orbit, the astronaut checked over the 11 experiments
in which he was to participate. He prepared to eject a six-inch-diameter sphere,
equipped with polar xenon strobe lights, that was to test his ability to spot
and track a flashing beacon in a tangential orbit. At three hours and 25 minutes
elapsed time, Cooper clicked the squib switch and heard and felt the beacon kick
away. But, try as he might, he could not see the flashing light in the dusk or
on the nightside during this round. On the fourth orbit, however, he did spot
the beacon at sunset and later saw it pulsing. So he knew he had indeed launched
a satellite from his satellite. Cooper jubilantly reported to Carpenter on
Kauai, "I was with the little rascal all night."

[496] Subsequently, on his fifth and sixth orbits, Cooper saw the flashing
xenon several more times, and likewise spotted the constant xenon ground light
of 44,000 watts placed at Bloemfontein, a little horseshoe-shaped town in the
Union of South Africa. Having eaten some bite-sized brownie and fruitcake foods
and excreted periodic samples for urinalysis, Cooper also kept up with his
calibrated exercises, took oral temperatures and blood pressure readings, and
did other duties required for the highest priority experiments of the MA-9
mission, the aeromedical ones.

Also on his sixth orbit, after nine hours in space, the astronaut set his
cameras, attitude, and switches to deploy a tethered balloon, similar to the one
tried on MA-7, for aerodynamic studies of drag and for more visual experiments.
The balloon, a 30-inch-diameter Mylar sphere painted fluorescent orange, was to
be inflated with nitrogen and attached by a 100-foot nylon line to the
spacecraft antenna canister; a strain gauge in the canister should be able to
measure the differences in pull on the balloon at apogee (166 miles) and perigee
(100miles). Cooper carefully went through his checklist, then tried to eject the
balloon package, but nothing happened. He tried again, and still nothing
happened. Because the antenna canister was later lost, no one ever knew why the
tethered balloon failed to eject. But the second failure of this experiment was
more severely disappointing than the first.

When Cooper surpassed Schirra's record by moving into a seventh orbital pass,
he was engaged with the radiation experiments and with the hydraulic work of
transferring urine samples and condensate water from tank to tank. During the
automatically recorded radiation measurements, he had to turn the recorders on
and off precisely on time and estimate accurately, without benefit of gyros, his
drifting spacecraft's attitude. The hydraulic work was more difficult, because
the hypodermic-type syringes used to pump the liquid manually from one bag
container to another were unwieldy and exasperatingly leaky. At 9:27 elapsed
time, Cooper spoke into his tape recorder, "The thing about this pumping under
zero g is not good. [Liquid] tends to stand in the pipes, and you have to
actually forcibly force it through."

After 10 hours of the mission, Zanzibar officially informed Cooper that he
had a go for 17 orbital passes. The tracking, communication, and computing
facilities at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland had long since settled
down to a routine in following Faith 7 around the world. The actual
orbital parameters for Cooper's flight were proving so close to those planned
that the differences were measurable only in tenths of a mile and hundredths of
a degree. MA-9 was circumnavigating Earth once every 88 minutes and 45 seconds
at an inclination angle of 32.55 degrees to the equator. Soon, as Earth turned
beneath Cooper, his orbital track would have shifted too much to keep him within
range of most of the scattered tracking and communications sites in Mercury's
worldwide network. Then, too, the word "orbit" would become confused, because
passing [497] over the same meridian on the rotating planet is not the same as
passing through the space-fixed point of orbital insertion.

Cooper spent his last "orbit" before his scheduled rest period, on orbits 9
through 13, in extensive activity. He finished the radiation measurements; he
ate his supper of powdered roast beef mush and gulped some water; he took
pictures over India and Tibet; and he checked all his machinery for readiness to
power down and drift and dream for the next seven hours or so. Passing from the
Himalayas to Japan in less than five minutes, Cooper was aroused by John Glenn's
second transmission from the tracking ship Coastal Sentry, located near
Kyushu. Veteran spaceman Glenn assured Astronaut Cooper, "You're sure looking
good. Everything couldn't be finer on this pass."Ten minutes later Cooper had
traversed the Pacific lengthwise in a southeasterly direction and had come over
the telemetry command ship Rose Knot, positioned near Pitcairn Island, at
latitude 25 degrees south and 120 degrees west. There he gave a full report on
all systems; the shipborne communicator advised him to "settle down for a long
rest."

But Cooper was still too excited and fascinated to feel sleepy. Orbit 9 was
to carry him again around South America, over Africa, northern India, and Tibet
during daylight, and he resolved to record on film some of the remarkable things
he could see while looking down at open terrain. On this circuit Cooper snapped
most of his best photographs, demonstrating his contention that he could see
roads, rivers, small villages, and even individual houses if the lighting and
background conditions were right. High over the highest plateau on Earth, the
Tibetan highlands, where the air is thin and visibility is seldom obscured by
haze, Cooper thought he could even judge speed and direction of ground winds by
the smoke from the house chimneys.

In their third radio contact, John Glenn, as "Coastal Sentry Quebec," advised
Cooper, who had now been in space over 13 hours, 34 minutes, that he should
"tell everyone to go away and leave you alone now." Cooper then relaxed and fell
into a sound sleep. He awoke drowsily an hour later when his suit temperature
got too high. Intermittently, for the next six hours, during orbital passes 10
through 13, Cooper napped, took more pictures, taped status reports
occasionally, and cursed to himself over the bothersome body-heat exchanger that
kept creeping away toward freezing or burning temperatures. At the end of his
rest period, Cooper taped his surprise at having napped so soundly that neither
floating arms nor weightless dreams had startled him into awareness of where he
was when he woke. But he cautioned psychologists not to make too much of this:

Have a note to be added in for head-shrinkers. Enjoy the full
drifting flights most of all, where you have really the feeling of freedom,
and you aren't worried about the systems fouling up. You have everything
turned off, and just drifting along lazily. However, I haven't encountered any
of this so-called split-off phenomena. Still note that I am thinking very much
about returning to Earth at the proper time and safely.

[499] Coming
around Muchea again, on his fourteenth pass, Cooper checked over all his
systems, found his oxygen supply plentiful, and reported his peroxide fuel for
attitude control showing 69 percent remaining in the automatic tank and 95
percent in the manual. He was in good shape, and all systems were still working
"as advertised." At this point, Gordon Cooper spoke a prayer into his tape
recorder aboard Faith 7, high in the heavens over the South Pacific. The
MA-9 mission was well beyond its midpoint in time and space, and Cooper was
humbly grateful that everything was still nominal. Physiologically his vision he
knew was abnormally good. Philosophically the vision of this eighth man in
history to orbit Earth in a manned satellite was bound to his culture, his
times, and his origins in Oklahoma.56

Orbit 15 was consumed largely in calibration of equipment and synchronization
of clocks, since by now Earthmen had experienced one more full 24-hour day of
grace, whereas Faith 7's elapsed time was faster by some 16 seconds than
range-zero elapsed time. Orbit 16 brought Cooper back over Cape Canaveral and
onward, virtually retracing his first shadow over Earth. The President of El
Salvador had radioed greetings on pass 15, and on 16 Cooper sent a similar
political greeting to African leaders meeting in Ethiopia. Then he buckled down
immediately to another high-priority experiment requiring elaborate timing
precautions.

As he entered Earth's shadow, or nightside, on this sixteenth orbit, Cooper
caged and freed his gyros in such a manner as to allow his automatic attitude
control system to torque the spacecraft slowly in pitch through the plane of the
ecliptic. He could view, through his window, the mysterious phenomena of
zodiacal light and night airglow layer. Together these two different objectives
were called "dim light" phenomena, and the experimental photographs were
designed to answer astrophysical questions about the origin, continuity,
intensity, and reflectivity of visible electromagnetic spectra along the basic
reference plane of the celestial sphere. They might also help answer some
questions about solar energy conversion in the upper atmosphere. From Zanzibar,
past the Canton Island station, Cooper called out the count as he clicked the
series of astronomical photographs. Although the zodiacal light pictures turned
out underexposed and the airglow shots overexposed, they were of usable quality
and supplemented Carpenter's pictures from Aurora 7 nicely.

Over Mexico, Cooper shifted to the next most important photographic task,
that of snapping horizon-definition imprints in each quadrant around his local
vertical position. Just as University of Minnesota scientists had prepared him
for the zodiacal light task, so Massachusetts Institute of Technology
researchers had arranged for these snapshots to aid in the design of a guidance
and navigation system for Project Apollo. Cooper's horizon-definition pictures
marked a significant advance beyond those from the MA-7 mission. In contact with
the Cape once again, Cooper lightheartedly complained like a typical American
tourist, "Man, all I do is take pictures, pictures, pictures!"

[500] But he was not through yet. On orbits 17 and 18 he took infrared
weather photographs of good quality and a few excellent moonset Earth-limb
pictures. Meanwhile, he resumed the geiger counter measurements for radiation,
continued his aeromedical duties, and adjusted his television monitor at the
request of ground observers. The eighteenth pass over the United States, like
the sixteenth, gave his extraordinary vistas of his country from southern
California, across Dallas the first time and Houston the second, to the Florida
peninsula. He sang during orbits 18 and 19, still surprised with every pass,
still marveling at the greenery on Earth and on his instrument panel as he came
toward his thirtieth hour in space.

Although "this fine plumbing they put in this thing" proved more troublesome
later, Cooper had learned to adjust his suit temperatures for comfort and to eat
and drink over the rim of his helmet fairly effectively, if awkwardly. Then on
his nineteenth orbit, while checking his warning lights before a high-frequency
antenna test over Hawaii, Cooper noticed the first potentially serious systems
anomaly of his mission.

A small telelight lit up green, indicating that Faith 7 was
decelerating and that the centripetal force of gravity had overcome by .05 g the
centrifugal force of the spacecraft's orbital moment of inertia. This had to be
a false indication, reasoned Cooper, because he felt, and his loose gear still
appeared, weightless. But were g forces building up imperceptibly? California
confirmed no such indication. Mercury Control showed great concern over the
implications of this little light for the attitude stabilization at retrofire.
The fears of the flight controllers were realized on the next pass, when Cooper
lost all attitude readings. Then, on the twenty-first orbit, a short-circuit
occurred in a busbar serving the 250-volt main inverter, leaving the automatic
stabilization and control system without electric power. The minor glitch had
become a serious hitch.

Mercury Control Center was in a flurry of worried activity, cross-checking
Faith 7's problems and Cooper's diagnostic actions with identical
equipment at the Cape and in St. Louis, then relaying to each communications
site questions to ask and instructions to give. Cooper remained cool, if not
calm, now that his alertness had been stimulated by a medically prescribed pill
of dextroamphetamine.

On the twenty-first pass (over the tracking ship Coastal Sentry), John
Glenn helped Cooper prepare a revised checklist for retrofire procedure during
the next, and last, time around. Only Hawaii and Zanzibar were within voice
radio range on this last circuit, but communications were good. When the ASCS
inverter blew out, Cooper also noted that the carbon dioxide level was rising in
both his suit and cabin. "Things are beginning to stack up a little" was his
classic understatement to Carpenter, and then Zanzibar heard him say he would
make a manual reentry.

Twenty-three minutes later Cooper came into contact with Glenn again,
reporting himself in retroattitude, holding manually, and with checkoff list
complete. Glenn gave the 10-second countdown, and Cooper, keeping his pitch down
34 degrees by his window reticle, shot his retrorockets manually on the "Mark!"
Glenn reported: "Right on the old gazoo. . . . Dealer's choice on reentry here,
[501] fly-by-wire or manual . . . It's been a real fine flight, Gordon. Real
beautiful all the way. Have a cool reentry, will you."

"Roger, John. Thank you."

And that he did. All the complicated, crowded events of the next 15 minutes
occurred precisely as planned, while Faith 7 plummeted down through the
atmosphere. Four miles ahead of the prime recovery ship, again the carrier
Kearsarge, just south of Midway Island, the canopied capsule containing
Gordon Cooper broke through a mild overcast and landed on the lazy waves of the
blue Pacific.

Splashdown came 34 hours and 20 minutes after liftoff. Cooper professed
disappointment that he too had "missed that third elevator" aboard "Begonia,"
meaning the Kearsarge. The spacecraft floundered in the water for a
moment, then righted itself, as hovering helicopters dropped their swimmers and
relayed Cooper's request as an Air Force officer for permission to be hoisted
aboard the Navy's carrier. Permission was granted, and 40 hot, humid minutes
later the explosive hatch blew open at the command of MSC engineer John B.
Graham, Jr. Physicians examined Cooper for eight more minutes while he lay in
the couch. Then they helped him emerge and steadied him during a moment of
dizziness until he regained his equilibrium. Away in triumph marched the one-man
crew of the one-day Mercury mission.57

Like Schirra, Cooper went through arduous medical, technical, and operational
debriefings aboard the Kearsarge and later back at the Manned Spacecraft
Center. He, too, was found to be dehydrated and suffering from a slight case of
orthostatic hypotension. He had lost seven pounds since suiting up, but after
drinking "a few gallons of liquid," he was fine, ebullient both mentally and
physically, and convinced that "we certainly can elongate this mission." Robert
C. Seamans, Jr., Associate Administrator of NASA, and Robert Gilruth, Director
of MSC, had different ideas about MA-10, but Cooper reiterated the proof that
"man is a pretty good backup system to all these automatic systems, and I think
the mission was conducted just like it was planned . . . in spite of . equipment
breaking down."58

In addition to undergoing technical debriefings over the next several days,
Cooper was honored by parades through Honolulu, Cocoa Beach, Washington - where
he addressed a joint session of Congress - and New York City, where he was
hailed by one of the largest tickertaped crowds ever to greet an individual.
Other crowds in Houston and in his hometown of Shawnee, Oklahoma, also
celebrated the return of the sixth Mercury astronaut from space.

The fact that Cooper, like Glenn, had had to take action to save his mission
from a probable failure added luster and meaning to the glory he received. While
postflight inspections, data reduction, and mission analyses proceeded through
the following month to pinpoint the causes of the few electromechanical faults
of the flight, Mercury systems engineers could find no fault with pilot
performance. Physicians, however, were cautious about the implications for
longer space missions of Cooper's hemodynamic response.

[503] Probably no other result of the MA-9 mission excited more interest than
Cooper's claim to have seen from orbit objects on the ground as small as trucks
and houses. Skepticism on this point abated after the astronaut explained in
detail to representative scientists at the Cape on May 21 just where, when, and
how he could see dust and smoke below, from 100 miles directly above - if the
contrast was right. Also at this, the first and only "scientific debriefing"
following a Mercury flight, the value of extensive questioning of the subject
pilot was clearly demonstrated, when Cooper was asked whether he could see
Earthshine on the Moon. "Well," he replied, "the Moon was fuller as it was
setting than it was on the nightside. It was almost a full Moon. Gee, that's
funny, I hadn't even realized that before. It seemed to be almost full as it was
setting, whereas on the nightside it was only a third of a Moon."59
This Moonshine was clearly Earthshine. Other postflight analyses added praise
for the sunshine that blessed Faith 7. "The sun literally smiled on
MA-9," wrote J. C. Jackson and Niles R. Heller in Goddard's report of the
network radio performance. "It [MA-9] was favored with better than average radio
frequency propagation conditions for the present phase of the solar sunspot
cycle."60

55 The description and all quotations in the
following account of the MA-9 flight are taken directly from the elaborate
"Postlaunch Memorandum Report for Mercury-Atlas No. 9 (MA-9): Part I, Mission
Analysis; Part II, Data; Part III, Mission Transcripts," MSC, June 24, 1963. For
color parallel to the voice transcript, the unedited Mercury Control transcript
of John A. Powers' broadcast commentary, "MA-9 Transcript," May 15, 1963, has
been followed.

"I would like to take this time to say a little prayer for all the people,
including myself, involved in this launch and this operation. Father, thank You
for the success we have had flying this flight. Thank You for the privilege of
being able to be in this position, to be up in this wondrous place, seeing all
these many startling, wondrous things that You've created. Help guide and direct
all of us, that we may shape our lives to be good, that we may be much better
Christians, learn to help one another, to work with one another, rather than to
fight. Help us to complete this mission successfully. Help us in our future
space endeavors, that we may show the world that a democracy really can compete,
and still are able to do things in a big way, are able to do research,
development, and can conduct various scientific, very technical programs in a
completely peaceful environment. Be with all our families. Give them guidance
and encouragement, and let them know that everything will be okay. We ask in Thy
name. Amen."

57 See L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., "Everyone Was
in a Sweat, I Was Secretly Pleased," Life, LIV (June 7, 1963); see also
other contract articles: "His Mission Is the Longest U.S. Orbit," Life,
LIV (May 17,1963); "He Brings It Right in on the Old Gazoo," Life, LIV
(May 24, 1963); and "Gordo Gets a Great Hello from the Kids and Kin,"
Life, LIV (May 31, 1963).